Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 28 February (2025)

Architects Unleash Their New Album, The Sky, The Earth & All Between!Architects are back and charging forward in the heavy rock world with their latest sonic masterpiece, The Sky, The Earth & All Between. After two relentless years on the road-featuring massive European summer tours with Metallica and top billing at festival stages across North America, from Sonic Temple to Aftershock-the band has returned to the studio to deliver their most powerful collection of songs yet.With the creative force of Jordan Fish (Bring Me The Horizon) behind the boards, Architects have captured the explosive energy of their live performances while elevating their signature melodic edge. This album reflects the perfect blend of raw intensity, emotional depth, and innovative production.Already making waves, singles like "Curse" and "Seeing Red" have drawn rave reviews from Metal Injection, Alternative Press, and Loudwire. Idobi crowned "Seeing Red" an "anthem powerhouse," and the track's global success landed it in the top 10 of charts worldwide-amassing over 45 million streams along the way.The Sky, The Earth & All Between builds on the momentum of their 2022 album, the classic symptoms of a broken spirit, which stormed to the top of the UK Rock and Metal Charts. With this new release, Architects are once again set to push the boundaries of modern heavy music, cementing their status as one of the most exciting and essential bands of our time.

California-bred singer-songwriter, Jillian Rose Banks, aka BANKS, crafts moody, alternative pop with shades of contemporary R&B. Emerging in the early 2010s with a handful of downtempo, alt-R&B tracks, BANKS created a signature sound that helped build a cross-genre audience. Her critically acclaimed and gold-certified debut album, Goddess, featured songs like “Before I Ever Met You,” “Warm Water,” and “Fall Over,” as well as collaborations with producers Justin Parker, Shlomo, and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. The album peaked just outside the Top Ten on the Billboard 200. In 2016, BANKS released her highly anticipated sophomore album, The Altar, which featured singles “Fuck with Myself,” “Gemini Feeed,” and “Mind Games,” and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200. BANKS returned in July 2019 with her third studio album, III, which featured her synth-heavy single “Gimme.” Additional contributors included Francis and the Lights on “Look What You’re Doing To Me” and producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rihanna) on “Hawaiian Mazes.” She released a short EP entitled Live and Stripped in 2020, followed by her 2022 album Serpentina, which BANKS recorded amid the pandemic during months of isolation and is tied to themes of shedding old skin and embracing the new. BANKS’s artistry stands out through the rawness and vulnerability that shines earnestly through her music. With so much success under her belt already, BANKS is looking forward to an exciting future ahead.

'Nothing' is the third album from DARKSIDE: nine transmissions of negative space, telepathic seance, and spectral improvisation. It fittingly started from scratch. On their first two reinventions, Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington entered the studio with a clutch of scattered ideas and loose melodic fragments to mold into what became the revered 'Psychic' (2013) and 'Spiral' (2021). But 'Nothing' reflected a search for form borne out of spontaneous elliptical jams, acoustic riffing, and digital levitations. And in a fundamental shift from their first dozen years as a band, Jaar and Harrington recruited their longtime friend and collaborator, the drummer and instrument designer Tlacael Esparza, to become a full-time member. The outcome is magnetic and hieroglyphic. This album slips through the cracks of convention with serpentine guitars, extraterrestrial static, and cavernous drums. Haunted rhythms, distorted vocals, and uncanny beauty. No band but DARKSIDE could have made 'Nothing,' and in no moment but now.

Billboard Heart, the new album by Deep Sea Diver, immediately puts the Seattle band in the company of St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, and Flock of Dimes, bands that have found newly ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. It's their fourth album and first for Sub Pop, and it is a coup, a triumph over self-doubt, transforming failure into an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and strength. In the middle of July 2023 in a Los Angeles studio, Deep Sea Diver mastermind Jessica Dobson took a guitar solo but somehow felt nothing. Just days earlier, her Seattle band played a series of semi-secret shows for devotees as de facto rehearsals for a new record. The sets had gone well, but the new songs seemed muddled, Dobson's conviction lost somewhere in the 1,000 miles between Southern California and the home studio she shares with partner, drummer, and frequent cowriter Peter Mansen. On that first night in Los Angeles, she broke down, wondering what she was doing there, and pondering how to fix it. Deep Sea Diver retreated home without an album. Did they need to scrap it, to begin again with new material? Not at all: Following a brief break, Dobson found a renewed sense of self, a trust in her vision for her band and songs and her ability to capture them. Over dinner with longtime collaborator Andy Park, a humbling confession that she needed help inspired Dobson to reimagine and reinvigorate Deep Sea Diver. This revelation set the stage for the power and brilliance of Billboard Heart, Three years before Dobson's galvanizing dinner with Park, Deep Sea Diver issued it's third album, 2020's Impossible Weight, via the colossal indie imprint, ATO. It was a significant step up, and earned the band a groundswell of exposure and a spot on Billboard charts. But the success caused Dobson to doubt her impulses, to wonder what an idea's impact or reception might be as much the strength of the idea itself. Moments of domestic creation, with her at the piano and Mansen on guitar in their Seattle living room, forged a path forward, and reinvigorated the pair's songwriting partnership. From end to end, the material on Billboard Heart is astonishing. The title track is the one song Deep Sea Diver actually finished in Los Angeles. It's a radiant and magnificent thing, the billowing synths of Elliot Jackson and tunneling pedal steel of Greg Leisz bolstering an anthem for fearlessly advancing into the future. "Emergency" links hardcore's vim to electroclash's instant allure with Dobson's captivating vocals and guitar work in the spotlight. Tender and vulnerable, "Tiny Threads" is a sweeping anthem for anyone trying to hold anything together-life, love, themselves. "If it haunts me, let it haunt me," Dobson sings softly over a stillness framed only by bass and noise. She let's her guitar careen into feedback, then steadily sculpts it into something tuneful. It's a lifetime of anxiety and sublimation, crystallized into 10 seconds. Billboard Heart feels that way at large.Billboard Heart emerged when Dobson trusted her instincts, a personal breakthrough that prompted an artistic one. It is, in turn, the best Deep Sea Diver album yet, a defiant and brilliant exclamation mark at the end of a long period of wandering.

Edith Frost breaks a very long silence with her first album since 2005! In Space revitalizes the timeless luminescence of her voice and songcraft with twelve new songs that take measure of isolation beyond the horizon of memory. Freezing time, then cracking it into crystalline shards, Edith discovers space everywhere she travels, within her and without her. A way-out country soul expression charting a heartening renewal of commitment and form.

Richard Russell has introduced the world to several generation’s worth of era-defining musicians. But since 2017, the XL Recordings founder has used the Everything Is Recorded project to prove he’s not merely a visionary record producer, or the founder of the most consequential independent record label of the past 35 years. He’s a visionary artist in his own right, with a temperament so generous that his records are filled with the voices of the artists he’s encouraged, shepherded, or spotlit along the way. Everything Is Recorded albums are feasts of collaboration, and his soul-enriching new album, Temporary, is no exception. The guest list overflows with incandescent talent: Florence Welch, Sampha, Bill Callahan, Jah Wobble, Kamasi Washington, Nourished by Time, Alabaster DePlume, Noah Cyrus. The silvery thread linking all these voices together is, of course, Richard Russell himself, by design the least visible member of Everything Is Recorded, but the only one who could have dreamed up this expanse to begin with. Russell began recording his collaborators’ musings on death and loss early on in the process for Temporary, and although they only survive in two carefully crafted audio collages (“October,” “The Summons”) on Temporary, their power suffuses the record. These are the most luminous and relaxed compositions of Russell’s career, reflecting a late-breaking fascination with British folk that dovetailed, not coincidentally, with Russell’s own brush with mortality in 2013. What is folk music, after all, if not a record of the voices of the dead? His music dissolves the borders between sampled and recorded, between modernity and antiquity, life and death, now and forever.. He grasps the true meaning of his album’s title: We may be, in fact, temporary. But our longing – for each other, for peace, for love and communion – goes on forever.

To listen to Ichiko Aoba is to be drawn into a world as intimateas a warmly lit home, but cosmic in scale. The Japanese artisthas taken a dedicated online fanbase built from viral TikToksound clips and critically acclaimed albums and translated itinto international tours spanning more than 20 countries.Aoba's latest album, Luminescent Creatures is the culminationof her 15-year long career - during which she's collaboratedwith Japanese luminaries such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, HaruomiHosono, Cornelius, and more - and finds her deftly melding thejazz-infused folk of her early albums with the orchestral worldbuilding of her 2020 opus Windswept Adan.While conducting field research on Ryukyu Archipelago, Ichikowas enamored by the boundless beauty, and occasional terrorof the ocean. She'd go freediving, submitting herself to thewhims of the tides. "I feel unable to resist the pull of the ocean,"Ichiko says, "and know how easy it would be for my small bodyto be swallowed by the sea." That contradiction, gentlenessand power, instilled a sense of awe that is expressed in thesoundscapes of Luminescent Creatures. "Luciférine" introducesher central theory: bioluminescence. Lush strings and twinklingpiano ripple like sunbeams on lapping waves, cutting throughthe dark expanse of the briny deep. "Inside each of us," shesings, "there is a place for our stars to sleep." It conjures animage of creatures pouring off light like celestial bodies, lightinga path to close the distance between galaxies. On "SONAR,"she ruminates on other ways to bridge the divide. "Beyond thedarkness, a glimmer of somebody's voice"-her own voice lowin the mix as if suppressed by insurmountable depths. An echoof her voice creeps in, reverberating like a whale song. Evenwith the most rudimentary senses, we find ways to one another.Luminescent Creatures is about making meaningfulconnections against impossible odds. The sea is immense andancient, but it is also reminiscent, housing a deep record offossils and recollections of how we've treated our planet."When I stare into the seemingly bottomless black depths of atrench," Ichiko reflects. "I occasionally see the blinking light ofsome rainbow-colored lifeform." That organism may not speakany known language, but in that moment it managed tocommunicate in a universal way. "My beloved LuminescentCreatures

World renowned rapper, singer, dancer and style icon, Lisa, will release her debut solo album "Alter Ego" on February 28, 2025 via LLOUD Co./RCA Records. With "Alter Ego", Lisa emulates five unique characters, showcasing her versatility and edge. The album will include previously released singles, "Rockstar", "New Woman" ft. Rosalia, and "Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me)", which have a combined

Canadian artist Marie Davidson's fifth album, City of Clowns, was produced by Belgian artists and producers Soulwax, longtime collaborators of Marie Davidson. Released on Deewee/Because Music, it includes the tracks, "Contrarian," and "Sexy Clown." Available on white vinyl with 3mm spine sleeve and UV gloss finish.

Tears for Injustice is a new recording of Mdou Moctar’s 2024 album Funeral for Justice performed entirely on acoustic instruments. Sessions took place at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio in the summer of 2023 — booked as a way to make use of downtime while the band was briefly stranded in the United Sates in the wake of Niger’s recent military coup. The arrangements give new dimension to the songs, swapping Funeral’s blistering volume for a more intimate and meditative tone.

Erotica Veronica - Miya Folick's third full-length album - delves deeper into intimate, sensual, and existential themes; challenging cultural taboos and advocating for a broader, more playful understanding of eroticism that goes beyond mere sexuality. "It's about richness of experience, a connection, an open approach to each day," she explains, adding that sharing her fantasies feels like "an act of tenderness and intimacy." Erotica Veronica is Miya's first self-produced album with contributions from talented writers/producers Jared Solomon (Remi Wolf, Chappell Roan, Paramore), Brad Hale (Grimes, The Naked and Famous), and Sam KS (Lizzie McAlpine, Shawn Mendes).Through her music, Miya Folick continues to evolve as an artist, blending delicate vulnerability with bold musical experimentation, tackling complex emotions with honesty and grace. From quiet folk leaning ballads to giant distorted guitars, it's intimate, powerful, and cathartic.

On Sinister Grift, Panda Bear’s first solo album in five years, he has returned with another statement that feels equally cumulative and unprecedented in his catalog. While his solo records have ranged from starkly intimate expressions of grief to colorful, electronic opuses, his music has never before sounded so warm and immediate. Working in his Lisbon, Portugal home studio with Animal Collective bandmate Josh “Deakin” Dibb, Lennox transforms Panda Bear into something resembling an old-school rock ensemble, playing nearly all the instruments himself and inviting kindred spirits into the process such as Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede, and—for the first time on a Panda Bear solo album—each of his Animal Collective bandmates.

Hand-break off, Sports Team are back. With musical pedals to the metal and saxophones at full throttle, the Mercury-nominated six-piece bring us their third studio album, Boys These Days. After their first two, Top 3 records – the Mercury Prize-nominated Deep Down Happy (2020) and Gulp! (2022). Think Prefab Sprout meets Roxy Music the band ally a seer-like lyrical insight with their most dynamic musical performances to date, Sports Team are piercing the content abyss. A “carousel of 21st-century sins”, this witty and insightful examination of modern life is both a critique and a celebration of its times. Yes, ‘Boys These Days’ takes aim at everything from advertising hype to relationship dysfunction, stationed at the point where the digital tide crashes onto IRL shores, but their perspective is fuelled by immersion in that landscape as Sports Team are scrolling along with the rest of us.

‘Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs’ is a Martin Phillipps passion project. A dedicated reimagining of his earlier unreleased songs that became his artistic farewell, a lasting legacy, and a reminder of his huge, underappreciated talent. The album has been finalised for release with the love and support of his band, family and friends. As the subject of an undulating life and times movie – The Chills: The Triumph And Tragedy Of Martin Phillipps – Chills’ singer, songwriter and main motivator, Martin Phillipps spent the last decade releasing studio and live albums while careering into his sixtieth year with typical gusto. Amid such momentum, Martin was stilling digging through old tapes, searching for the foundations that resulted in global rapture in 1987, an overnight success that took a mere seven years to ignite. These early songs and musings were revisited, revised and finally put to record. As such, ‘Spring Board’ is the final chapter of The Chills, immeasurably significant output. ‘Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs’ is alarming, personal, brittle and at times hopelessly upbeat. This is a man casting his mind back on an esoteric career that led to nothing short of cult status; someone rediscovering his roots, his innermost thoughts, hopes and fears. The Chills are Martin Phillipps, Oli Wilson, Erica Scally, Callum Hampton and Todd Knudson. ‘Spring Board’ features contributions from Fur Patrol’s Julia Deans, Elroy Finn and Split Enz, Crowded House alumni Neil Finn, Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook, Manics producer Greg Haver, Troy Kingi, Shona Laing, Tami Neilson, Dianne Swann (Everything That Flies) and Purple Pilgrims’ Clementine Valentine.

“When you gonna stop running?” The Men demand to know in the opening line of “Pony,” the blistering first track and lead single from the New York rock quartet’s album, Buyer Beware. Make no mistake—this is no sign of an existential crisis, but rather a call to arms for a band that has never stood still for very long. By their own count, Buyer Beware is their 15th album since their debut We Are The Men (2009), and their 4th for Fuzz Club following New York City (2023), Fuzz Club Sessions No. 20 (2023), and Manhattan Fire (2024). But this doesn't count the limited tapes (like ‘Live in Zagreb’), singles or splits - so you might as well stop trying to count. The Men have a work ethic as old school as their rock roots, yet despite the hustle they never appear to be rushing, a contradiction that somehow naturally resolves itself through their music, reconciling with Zen-like balance the raw fury of punk rock with the minimalist austerity of Steve Reich (or, outside of music, Mark Rothko).

The band Unknown Mortal Orchestra sometimesenjoys making purely instrumental music. Inaddition to the vocal-based records they're morewell-known for, they've also begun to make aninstrumental series called the IC where they spendtime in a chosen city and improvise and collaborateon non-vocal music. Recently the band spent timein Colombia to make music and initiate their newkeyboard player Christian LI. The resulting sessionshave become IC-02 Bogota, a musical document ofthe time they spent in that exciting city and thepossible background music for some strangeparties and night drives in your future.

For the first time on vinyl, Yo La Tengo's understated, lonesome score to Kelly Reichardt's classic "Old Joy." The six instrumental tracks, created in collaboration with legendary guitarist Smokey Hormel, carry that unmistakable YLT sound-but delivered in service of another great work of art. The music, like so much of Reichardt's film work, is low-key yet arresting, stripped down to the essentials, warm and unpretentious. The record includes two variations on the beloved "Leaving Home" theme, released for the first time on vinyl after years traveling in YLT fan circles. Originally released on They Shoot, We Score, a CD compiling several of the band's soundtracks, Old Joy stands as a cohesive whole here, blooming and rewarding repeat listens.